Ubetoo - Revenue share platform for unsigned artists.

I'm not sure I can keep up with all these great Swedish music startups. First Spotify, then Soundcloud (technically based in Berlin but populated with lots of Swedish expats), and now Ubetoo.

Ubetoo is a platform which allows unsigned artists to upload music and audio and receive up to 90% of ad revenue from commercials run alongside the content. Whilst YouTube does have a scheme similar to this, it is only open to a smattering of loyal and attention worthy content producers.


This also gets over the criticism of social networking sites exploiting artists for attention but not sharing their enormous ad revenue. At the EconMusic Digital Music Conference back in September, Billy Bragg singled out MySpace and Bebo as two of the most guilty parties.

In order to qualify for the 90% ad revenue share, content producers have to sign up to Stagepool, which is an audition and casting service based in Stockholm and Cologne. Last month the artist with the highest pay out was The Vetter Factory with 158, 23 euros. Not too shabby.


The site also includes a number of widgets to embed channels and content on other social networking sites. However, I'm not too sure these sites would be too happy at Ubetoo piggybacking them to derive significant significant ad revenue.

Open Education

There was a great supplement in The Guardian yesterday, entitled Digital Student.

One article which particularly stood out was on Apple's Itunes U service, allowing for universities to upload lectures for free for users to download. This is something the likes of Stanford and Harvard have been down with for a while now but it was only a couple of months ago that Oxford and Cambridge got on the case too.

Services like Itunes U allow a unique marketing opportunity for globally recognized institutions to build brand equity by spreading their content to every corner of the globe.

Personally, I am a huge fan The Open University's OpenLearn facility. Over the last couple of months I've enrolled in a few maths modules to bring my numeracy skills up to scratch. The platform provides a plethora of subjects and modules for users to sign up to, totally free. It's fascinating to look at the other members enrolled in each module and see how their membership is made up from people mostly outside of the UK. I've also dipped my toe into an Introduction To Computer Science course at Harvard, which can be accessed here.

The future of education is clicks and mortar.

In the current financial climate it is logical to assume that tech investments will be made in startups that have some kind of social benefit. Channel 4's stake in School Of Everything is just one example of this.

Habitat - The First Virtual World?

Great link forwarded to me from Ben Atkins. It seems futurism was alive and well in 1986.



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